Self-stick easel pads are important collaborative tools for meetings as they give the meeting participants a medium to write and draw in order to present ideas for discussion. A typical self-stick easel pad includes large sheets of paper (e.g., 25×31 inch) with a stripe of repositionable adhesive coated along one edge of a back surface of the sheet of paper. Multiple sheets are often stacked together to form a pad by having the adhesive stripe of one sheet in contact with a front surface of the next sheet. In some cases, the pad configuration can cause high adhesion between the adjacent sheets thereby complicating a user's ability to advance or flip from one sheet to the next sheet. The adhesion between adjacent sheets can be so high that the adhesive on the flipped sheet does not release from the next sheet. This non-release decreases the writing surface area of the next sheet.
To address the high adhesion problem, some skilled in the art have provided self-stick easel pads with a release liner. The liner separates the adhesive portion of one sheet with the front surface of the next sheet thereby decreasing the resistance encountered when a sheet is flipped. The liner, however, poses an inconvenience when the user wants to remove the sheet from the easel pad and thereafter attach the sheet to a surface, such as a wall, as the user will need to remove the release liner.
Others skilled in the art have used non-adhesive particles. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,556,595 (Ochi) discloses a pressure sensitive adhesive having a layer of uniformly dispersed non-adhesive solid particles. The particles have an average diameter less than 10 microns and less than the thickness of the pressure sensitive adhesive layer. The particles can be on the surface or in the surface layer of the pressure sensitive adhesive layer. The pressure sensitive adhesive layer is said to have sufficiently low adhesion strength to permit easy registering on a surface to make possible its relocation to avoid bonding imperfections such as wrinkles, foams, or swellings.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,344,693 (Sanders) discloses a component in the form of a substrate having spacing means extending in a direction outwardly from a surface of the substrate. The spacing means spaces the surface and any substance, such as an adhesive, carried thereon from any other surface when located adjacent to the component. The spacing means has a non-adhesive contactable surface and is non-deformable in normal use of the component.